Michael Green

Writer and producer

Into the wind

In Community development, Environment, The Age on

Planning restrictions and false health fears have stalled Victoria’s wind industry. But this may be changing.

GWENDA Allgood is a no-nonsense local councillor, five times a mayor, from Ararat. In mid-November she travelled east to Seymour to speak about wind farms at forum on energy held in the bowls club hall.

“We did not have one objection,” she told the audience, explaining the benefits of the Challicum Hills wind farm, built in 2003. “I can only speak as I find: there is no noise [from the turbines]. I don’t know why, but there isn’t. And they’re our best ratepayer – they pay well, they really do.”

There were about 50 people in the hall; almost all were renewable energy supporters. The event was hosted by a local environment group, with speakers on the topics of home retrofitting, community solar power and the campaign against coal seam gas.

But there was one key reason for the afternoon’s proceedings: the Cherry Tree wind farm, 16 turbines planned for a nearby ridgeline above the Trawool Valley.

The wind farm, proposed by Infigen Energy, was before the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal. The project had become controversial in late 2012, following a meeting held by the anti–wind farm activist group, the Landscape Guardians.

After receiving 117 objections, the local council delayed and finally denied the permit, against the advice of its planning officers. The company appealed; the matter had already been before the tribunal for ten months.

When Allgood finished speaking at the meeting, a man named Gary Morris put his hand up. Sounding slightly nervous, he read from his notes about a survey criticising another wind farm. “I’m just concerned about the noise aspect,” he said.

“Instead of getting on the internet,” Allgood replied, “you need to go out and visit them. I invite you to Ararat, and I will personally show you around.”

Afterwards, Morris explained that his home was within 3 kilometres of the proposed turbines, but Infigen had never met with him. “My concerns aren’t just about noise. It’s about health, and it’s about this company,” he said.

*

Like the rest of the world, Australia urgently needs to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions to avoid runaway climate change. A recent report by Bloomberg New Energy Finance says new wind turbines are already cheaper than new coal- or gas-fired power stations, even without carbon pricing. And yet, the forecast for wind power is remarkably mixed.

In 2009, the South Australian government set a target for renewables to cover one-third of its energy production by 2020. It has nearly met the mark already. Wind power alone now accounts for 27 per cent.

But in Victoria, the industry has stalled. In August 2011 the state government stiffened its planning rules, giving people who live within two kilometres of wind farms the right to veto, and prohibiting turbines in several regions.

A new report from Victoria’s Commissioner for Environmental Sustainability, Professor Kate Auty, says wind power comprises less than 3 per cent of the state’s electricity generation.

The report strongly criticises the planning restrictions, arguing they discourage a shift to low-carbon energy, make it more difficult and costly to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and damage the local economy.

“Many proposals for new wind farms in Victoria have been withdrawn. Lost investment has been estimated at $4 billion and 3,000 jobs,” the report says, quoting figures from the Clean Energy Council.

The Labor party has promised to repeal the restrictions if it wins government in next years’ state election. In the meantime, the new federal government appears unlikely to encourage the industry.

A spokesperson for Industry minister Ian Macfarlane says the government will commission a study into “the potential health effects of wind farms”, and confirms that it will go ahead with a scheduled review of the federal renewable energy target, due next year. It has already tabled legislation to scrap the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, which would otherwise invest $5 billion in renewable energy over the next 5 years.

*

Two weeks after the forum in Seymour, VCAT finally approved the permit for Cherry Tree. It is now only the second wind farm to win planning permission in Victoria since August 2011.

The tribunal said the Victorian and NSW heath departments had expressly stated “there is no scientific evidence to link wind turbines with adverse health effects”, and that view was backed by the National Health and Medical Research Council.

It rejected the survey evidence of health concerns tended by anti-wind groups, the Waubra Foundation and the Landscape Guardians.

“To be of any real value such surveys need to be carried out by qualified professionals on respondents selected by accepted random selection methods, and subjected to an analysis that yields statistically valid results,” it said.

The tribunal had earlier ruled that the visual and noise impacts of the project were acceptable, and that the turbines would not cause problems with bushfire, salinity, erosion, aviation or loss of wildlife habitat.

It was a comprehensive victory, both for the company and the wind industry at large.

On the same day, the South Australian Environment Protection Authority released the results of its study of noise from the Waterloo wind farm. Nearby residents who had previously complained were asked to keep noise diaries; in them, they noted “rumbling effects” even at times when the turbines had been shut down. The authority’s recordings showed the turbines meet local and international standards for both audible and low frequency sound.

Ketan Joshi, from Infigen, says his company understands that this evidence, and the VCAT decision, won’t change everyone’s minds. “We’re aware that a lot of these concerns don’t magically vanish as soon as you get approval.

“The industry really depends on good community engagement. People need to be deeply involved in the development, otherwise you’re likely to face opposition.”

Joshi confirms that Infigen hasn’t met individually with Gary Morris. “It’s hard to talk to everybody one-on-one, because there are a large number of people around our projects,” he says.

For Cherry Tree, the company had held two public meetings, as well as stalls at a local festival and a tour of the Hepburn wind farm. But for future projects, it is considering ways to give locals “a much bigger stake in the shape a wind farm takes”, Joshi says.

The anti–wind farm push in Seymour began with a public meeting coordinated by the Landscape Guardians. One of the speakers was Max Rheese, executive director of climate change denial groups the Australian Environment Foundation and the Australian Climate Science Coalition.

At a council meeting held in October 2012, just two days before the local elections, nearly 40 people spoke against the wind farm. Among them was Peter Mitchell, the chairman of the Waubra Foundation. Subsequently, the foundation, which has tax-deductible charity status, sought donations to fund its case against Cherry Tree before VCAT.

In response, BEAM, the local environment group, distributed a “myth-busting” flyer supporting the turbines, together with Friends of the Earth.

“They’d managed to scare the pants off a lot of people,” says Leigh Ewbank, from Friends of the Earth. “There’s no way developers can compete with a political campaign of that nature. And it isn’t dying down, despite all the evidence showing that wind energy is clean and safe.”

The “contemporary health panic” about turbines has drawn the attention of public health academic Professor Simon Chapman, from University of Sydney. Chapman, who is renowned for his work on tobacco control, has traced the health and noise complaints made about Australia’s wind farms.

In a paper published in October, he revealed that only 129 people have complained – a tiny proportion of the population who live near turbines – and almost all of them did so after 2009, when critics began publicising the alleged health worries.

There have been no health complaints in Western Australia, which has 13 wind farms.

“A majority of wind farms, even big ones, have no history of complaints at all,” he says. “The complaints line up with half a dozen wind farms that have been targeted by the anti–wind farm groups. That’s the ‘nocebo’ hypothesis: if you spread anxiety you’re going to get anxiety.”

“If you tell people that something is going to happen to them and you demonstrate people who are worried, then it becomes a communicated disease.”

The final speaker at the Seymour forum was Doug Hobson, a farmer from Waubra with a thick goatee beard. He has eight turbines on his property. “The wind turbines have helped underlay what we’re doing as a farming community,” he said. “It takes the lows out of farming.”

He explained that almost all the people of Waubra do not want their town’s name to be associated with the anti–wind farm group, the Waubra Foundation. In November they mailed a petition with 316 signatures asking it to change its name.

“Niney-five per cent of the people in Waubra are in favour of the wind farm,” he said. “Country people don’t like change, but it does just become part of the furniture.”

*

The only other wind farm approved in Victoria in more than two years is at Coonooer Bridge, a small farming community north-west of Bendigo. Its story is very different.

The project is being developed by Windlab, a spin-off company from CSIRO founded in 2003. It has since built turbines in Australia, Canada, USA and South Africa. Soon after it began, Windlab identified that the hills near Coonooer Bridge were particularly windy: in fact, their steady, strong winds offer a renewable resource among the best in the world.

But in 2012, when Windlab began to consider building turbines there, Luke Osborne, the project’s director, knew that wind energy was becoming controversial in rural areas. He knew from personal experience, because he has turbines on his family farm near Canberra.

“It had become clear that we needed to work on gaining a ‘social licence to operate’,” he explains. “It wasn’t good enough just to get it approved. It needed to have a much better level of local acceptance.”

His team began a series of town hall–style meetings with everyone who owned land nearby, as well as one-on-one conversations, in which they devised the ownership model for the project. “We said, ‘We not only want people living nearby to share in the financial benefits, we also want you to help guide how we do this’,” Osborne recalls.

In less than a year, the five-turbine project had been approved by the local council. It will produce enough electricity to power 11,000 households.

Thirty landholders are shareholders. The farmers with turbines on their properties agreed to take lower rent, and the company, slightly lower profits; those returns are shared among the neighbours. As with many other wind farms, it will donate money to the community – in this case $25,000 each year. Everyone within 5 kilometres of the turbines will get a vote on how it’s spent.

“We haven’t had any outsiders come in opposing the project,” Osborne says. “I hope that’s because we haven’t given anybody a reason to invite them in.”

Osborne modelled his approach on the research of Dr Nina Hall, from CSIRO, who is studying the idea of “social licence to operate” for wind farms.

In interviews with rural residents, her team has found “strong community support for the development of wind farms”, including from those who don’t speak out through the media or political forums.

Hall concluded that people’s attitudes to the local impacts are shaped by the way a project is run.

She noticed that people opposed to wind farms would initially talk about technological worries. “When we dug a little deeper, we often found their opposition was based more on concerns about process,” she explains. “Things like how they found out about the development, and whether they felt they had influence over the design, location and the final decision about whether it would go ahead.”

Ian Olive is one of those people. He has been farming near Coonooer Bridge all his life, continuing the work of his parents and grandparents. Now the 69-year-old tends his crops and merino sheep with the help of his two sons, whose young families live on the property too.

Although he supports renewable energy, Olive is not pleased by the prospect of turbines near his farm. His family would prefer “to keep the status quo”, he says. He expects the turbines, standing on the low mountain range on the south-western horizon, will be “a stark monstrosity against the natural beauty” of his skyline.

But equally, Olive says, Windlabs couldn’t have conducted its consultation any better: the scheme has created no resentment between neighbours. He says “the company has done a good job in helping the community” through its annual fund and the shareholdings for surrounding landowners, including his family.

For Osborne, gaining the trust of families like the Olives represents the project’s biggest triumph. “We’ve tried our best to make sure the benefits for the local area are real and well understood,” he says. “It’s not a silver bullet – not everyone wants to live near turbines – but for the majority it has made a difference.

“I’m a big believer in the fairness of this model. I hope what we’ve done here will help the industry.”

Read this article at The Age online

The Great Barrier Reef: just unwell or terminally ill?

In Environment, The Age on

Starfish, chemicals, climate change. If things continue the way they are, the reef won’t be great for much longer.

AT 3 pm on July 16, 1928, Charles Maurice Yonge and his team of scientists sighted the Low Isles, north of Cairns, from their boat. His wife Mattie, a doctor, described “a circular mound of sand about 250 yd. diameter”. That mound would be their home for the next year.

So began the first modern research expedition on the Great Barrier Reef.

As Professor Iain McCalman, from University of Sydney, describes in his new book The Reef – A Passionate History, they were an industrious group of young scientists from Cambridge University, both men and women.

Marine science was in its early stages and they’d been assigned one of the Earth’s uncharted treasures.

Their findings were published in seven large volumes; among them were revelations about the interdependence of corals and algae and the growth rates of corals – which had rings like trees, they noticed – as well as the first observation of coral bleaching.

In the 1970s, more than 40 years later, septuagenarian Sir Maurice – who by then had been knighted – returned to the Low Isles. He was dismayed by what he found; or more precisely, by what he didn’t. For all the silt from agricultural run-off, he couldn’t locate the places he’d conducted his experiments.

Sir Maurice may have been appalled, but scientists now yearn for the days of his disappointment, so badly has the reef deteriorated in recent decades.

In 1985 the Australian Institute of Marine Science began monitoring more than 100 locations on the reef. In the years since, coral cover has diminished by half, on average. At the current rate of decline, it will halve again by 2022.

The relentless degradation of one of the seven natural wonders of the world has not gone unnoticed. Next June, UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee will convene in Qatar for its annual meeting. It has foreshadowed that “without evidence of substantial progress” it will classify the reef as “in danger”.

Queensland’s tourism industry nervously awaits UNESCO’s verdict. The reef is estimated to create up to $6 billion dollars annually for Australia’s economy, supporting 50,000 jobs.

Daniel Gschwind, from the Queensland Tourism Industry Council, believes a downgraded classification would deter visitors and could put his industry in danger. “Regardless of the actual health of the reef, the damage to our reputation as a destination of natural wonders would be serious,” he says.

In early November, in response to warnings issued by UNESCO, the reef’s management authority produced a 650-page, draft strategic assessment report.

It stated that the northern third of the reef is in good condition, but south of Cooktown, its health has “declined significantly”.

Biodiversity is deteriorating. While humpback whales are increasing in number, the populations of dugongs, turtles and some seabirds are diminishing. Coral reefs and seagrass meadows are “in serious decline”.

The authority declared that climate change is “still the most serious threat facing the reef”. The ocean is increasing in temperature and becoming more acidic, and sea levels are rising. “More frequent and severe extreme weather is also predicted,” it said.

Until now, the major cause of damage has been poor water quality. Wherever the land has been cleared for farming and settlement, polluted water drains into the inshore reef, laden with fertilizer and silt. In the last decade, cyclones and floods have battered the coast and consequently, rivers have clogged the reef with plumes of mud visible from space.

The authority noted another “key concern” caused by the development and operation of ports: the dumping of dredge spoil at sea. Overall, it concluded, “a business-as-usual approach to managing these impacts will not be enough”.

*

Dr Peter Doherty, from the Australian Institute of Marine Science, began studying the reef in the 1980s. He helped create the long-term research program that revealed the loss of half the reef’s coral cover since monitoring began.

He says cyclones and the crown-of-thorns starfish are each responsible for more than 40 per cent of the damage, while coral bleaching currently accounts for about one-tenth.

Coral bleaching and cyclones are matters of extreme weather, Doherty says. Locally, we can do nothing to prevent them, but “we probably can do something about crown-of-thorns”.

Since it was first observed as a problem in the 1960s, there have been four outbreaks of the coral-eating starfish, roughly 15 years apart.

The cycle is too fast to allow the corals to recover naturally. “In the 1960s, there was a large-scale increase in the application of inorganic fertiliser to sugarcane fields,” Doherty explains. “It’s likely that this is a major driver in the frequency and severity of the current outbreaks of starfish.”

In 2003, the federal and state governments adopted Reef Plan, a ten-year strategy to reduce water pollution. Updated in 2009, it included targets to halve nitrogen and pesticide runoff, and dramatically improve the land management practices of graziers, sugarcane growers and horticulturalists.

Doherty sits on the scheme’s independent scientific panel. “In recent times we are putting 5 times more sediment, up to 8 times more nitrogen and 6 times more phosphorous into the reef than we should be. Turning that around is a very large task.”

So far, the results have fallen well short of the targets, which have been deferred until 2018. Both levels of government have committed more funding.

Doherty describes Reef Plan as “a substantial response”, which is beginning to show small gains. But it may not be enough. “Like anything, it’s going to get harder and harder to make deeper gains.”

Right now, just as the reef is in the most precarious condition we’ve known, the crown-of-thorns starfish is on the brink of its worst infestation.

Heavy rains in the last five years have flooded the continental shelf north of Cairns with “nutrient-enriched plumes”, creating what Doherty describes as “the perfect broth for feeding larval starfish”.

A large female starfish can produce tens of millions of eggs at each spawning. Carried on southerly currents, they’re causing cascading outbreaks in the central reef that could last for ten years.

The tourism industry is attempting triage. Funded by the federal government, teams of divers are killing starfish by injecting them one-by-one with bile salts. In the last 18 months, the program has culled more than 100,000 starfish, mainly around popular tourist sites.

It is a Sisyphean undertaking. “The target is in the millions, distributed over more than 1000 kilometres of reef perimeter,” Doherty says. “It’s extremely unlikely we’ll be able to effectively control the starfish population using divers with poisons.”

Instead, the reef is suffering death-by-report.

Dr Colin Hunt, an ecological economist from University of Queensland, was one of the authors of the first 25-year plan for the reef, released in 1994. Entitled The Great Barrier Reef – Keeping it Great, it called for the effects of runoff to be studied and targets set to reduce their impacts.

In practice, the goal of improving water quality has proven strictly aspirational.

Likewise, the marine park authority’s new strategic assessment stresses the need to measure “cumulative impacts”, rather than the narrow effects of each project or use of the reef. The Keeping it Great report made the same recommendation two decades ago.

More recently, the authority’s Great Barrier Reef Outlook Report declared the reef ecosystem was “at a crossroad” in 2009. “It is decisions made in the next few years that are likely to determine its long-term future,” it said.

Since then, there’s been a port-building boom along the coast, paving the way for increased coal trade and the beginning of a gas export industry.

These developments have alarmed UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee. In June, it noted “with concern” that the impacts of “ongoing coastal development on the reef continue and progress towards addressing them is limited”. It requested that ports not be permitted outside existing locations.

In December, federal environment minister Greg Hunt will decide on applications to expand the Abbot Point port, north of Bowen, and a fourth gas export plant at Curtis Island, near Gladstone. Three further coal terminals are going through Queensland’s environmental approval process.

Colin Hunt expects UNESCO will watch those decisions closely. He says the impact of dredging is limited compared to agricultural runoff and climate change, but the cumulative effects of industrialisation are clear.

“These port developments are impacting wildlife and destroying part of the reef, there’s no doubt about it,” he says. “The coal and gas companies are responsible for doing their own environmental impact statements – the system is flawed because of conflicts of interest.”

Hunt believes polluters must bear the true costs of both runoff and port development. Farmers should be fined if they don’t meet water quality targets, and resources companies should pay for dredge spoil to be disposed on land, not within the reef’s waters.

“If we really want to tackle this problem, we have to make the polluter pay,” he says. “It is time to have a proper reckoning. The reality is extremely serious: unless these trends turn around, we’re going to lose the reef.”

*

In the early 1970s, when Sir Maurice returned to visit the location of his 1928 expedition, he was chaperoned by a knockabout young Australian scientist, Dr J. E. N. ‘Charlie’ Veron.

Granted a post-doctoral scholarship by James Cook University, Veron was the reef’s first full-time researcher.

“Sir Maurice was very formal and dignified – a real jacket-and-tie guy – but I got to like him a lot,” recalls Veron, who is rather less formal. (Years later, the young scientist found himself “in strife” for showing a nude photo of an expedition leader during a presentation at the Royal Society in London.)

The visit was a changing of the guards; subsequently, Veron became the world authority on corals and reefs. He devised a new taxonomy for corals and discovered one-fifth of all known species.

“In the 50 years I’ve been diving, I’ve noticed a heck of a lot of change,” he says. “The drop off in shark numbers because of overfishing is the most dramatic.”

One coral, Montipora – which grows like overlapping plates on a waiter’s arm – was once the most common species near the coast, but has now all but vanished.

“On the outer slopes of the far northern Great Barrier Reef, the corals look much the same as always,” he says. “There are now very few places on the reef I would say that about.”

In 2008, Veron published A Reef in Time: The Barrier Reef from Beginning to End, a book on coral reefs and climate change. He wrote that the prognosis for the world’s reefs “does indeed seem bleak, but it is not yet hopeless”.

Every summer, he becomes nervous about the risk of mass coral bleaching – a risk that worsens as the oceans warm. During the El Niño weather cycle, warmer currents pulse into the reef’s lagoon. With clear skies for a few weeks, the water temperature can increase beyond the corals’ ability to cope.

Energised by global warming, El Niño cycles will become more extreme. Humans have already created the conditions for more intense storms and floods, droughts that trigger erosion, and frequent mass coral bleaching.

Veron is also fixated by the threat of ocean acidification – a lesser-known consequence of carbon dioxide emissions – which causes a kind of coralline osteoporosis. If it goes unchecked, the reefs will eventually erode.

He considers the health of the world’s reefs an early warning of a broader collapse. If they fail, other ecosystems will follow, rapidly.

“We’re driving the Earth into conditions for the sixth mass extinction and we’re doing it very, very quickly,” he says. “I’ve got teenage children and it terrifies me to think what they’re going to face in their later life.”

In this context, the environmental impact statements for the new coal and gas ports are dangerously incomplete. Dredging may cause localised damage, but the ports’ very reason for being – to expand fossil fuel exports – exacerbates the Great Barrier Reef’s gravest existential threat.

The emissions associated with proposed coalmines in Queensland’s Galilee Basin alone would dwarf Australia’s total carbon footprint.

“We’re making money out of doing the things that drive climate change, which will destroy the reef,” Veron says. “We are a wealthy country – we have a moral obligation to future generations to keep coal in the ground. I can’t see any rational argument against that.”

Threats to the reef

Fertiliser runoff causes plankton blooms, which promote outbreaks of the coral-killing crown-of-thorns starfish.

Sediment blocks the light required by corals, sponges and seagrass and starves marine life of normal sources of nutrition.

Pesticides poison coral larvae, even at trace levels.

Climate change sets the conditions for more frequent and intense storms, cyclones, droughts and floods, which contribute to plumes of polluted runoff. Ocean warming increases the likelihood of coral bleaching. Ocean acidification weakens coral skeletons and slows coral growth.

Dredging causes plumes of silt and disturbs local habitats.

Overfishing and illegal fishing threaten important predators such as sharks and coral trout.

 

Read this article at The Age

The force of racial bias

In Social justice, The Age on

Are Victorian police biased against people of particular ethnic backgrounds? A chorus of voices is speaking out about racism and the force is taking steps to tackle the problem.

BJ Kour took the microphone at the Melbourne Town Hall, on a Sunday in August. “I want to stand up because I’m fired up,” he said with a small smile, which was received with gentle laughter by those gathered to listen, in a stately room with worn carpets. He grew serious. “I am from South Sudan. My story is a real story.”

He related several disturbing encounters with Victoria Police, including one while he was a youth worker in Dandenong. He said he faced charges of hindering an investigation after asking the police for their names during the arrest of two young men he knew. The charges were later dropped, but not before an officer had phoned his boss to suggest he might not be a good employee.

Kour was speaking at the People’s Hearing into Racism and Policing. About 200 people attended over two days, and heard distressing testimony from young men and women of African, Arab and Pacific Islander backgrounds. They told of confronting, often violent, experiences with police, many of which had escalated from unnecessary contact.

Mohamad Tabbaa, an executive director of the Islamic Council of Victoria and a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne, described how as a young man of Lebanese background he was constantly harrassed by police. He told of being rounded up with his friends, thrown into divvy vans, and beaten with copies of the Yellow Pages. On trains, he said, they were fined even when they had tickets, because as one policeman said, “you’re a ‘f…g Lebo’’. The harassment and fines continued, he says. Eventually, he felt so humiliated and disheartened, he stopped buying tickets.

Although he never faced any charges, he still carries a debt of about $10,000 in unpaid fines from those years. But he counts himself lucky. “Most of my friends from my childhood and early adolescent days have ended up in jail, on the streets, on drugs, dead or simply unmotivated,” he said.

The event was coordinated by IMARA Advocacy, a youth-led lobby group founded after the death of a young Ethiopian-Australian man in Melbourne’s inner-west two years ago.

One of the facilitators, Reem Yehdego, believes the forum has ended debate about whether or not discriminatory policing exists in Melbourne. “It was an incredibly emotional and heartbreaking two days, but the general responses were of relief, hope and healing,” she says.

Like Kour, a number of young men began their testimony by affirming that theirs was a true story. It was the mark of people unused to having their voices heard.

This time, however, those stories were recorded and transcribed. They will be submitted to Victoria Police, which is holding twin inquiries into its cross-cultural training and the way officers deal with people they stop in the street.

Victoria Police agreed to the inquiries in February as part of the settlement of a long running racial discrimination case. Several young African-Australian men had sued the police, claiming they were regularly stopped around Flemington and North Melbourne for no legitimate reason, and assaulted and racially taunted.

The case is set to have a deep and lasting impact on policing in Victoria.

Among some 70 public submissions to the inquiries, the Law Institute of Victoria provided a particularly strong critique, calling for “profound cultural change” and an “overhaul” of standards, including restricted stop and search powers. The first step, it said, was “to acknowledge that racial bias exists in current policing practices”.

Reynah Tang, the institute’s president, says his members consistently report that clients are regularly stopped for reasons of their race or religion.

Similarly, a submission co-authored by Jeremy Rapke QC, the former Director of Public Prosecutions, stated that racial profiling and racial bias “exists throughout the institution of Victoria Police”. Racial profiling occurs when police stop people, either consciously or unconsciously, because of their race.

In response, the Chief Commissioner of Police, Ken Lay continues to walk a thin blue line, defending the reputation of the force while also rebuking “individuals whose attitudes are intolerable and offensive”.

He says the huge majority police interactions with the public are positive, but the submissions from the People’s Hearing will provide a “wake-up call”.

“I’m not going to try and defend the indefensible, I know that at times our people let us down.”

The inquiries’ final reports will be released in December, and Lay says he is “open to anything possible”.

“I know there is a level of discomfort, distrust and bad behaviour. This is why this work is important to us. Out of a really, really difficult situation, Victoria Police will be a better organisation,” he says.

He has just appointed former AFL executive Sue Clark to a new high-level role. Beginning in late September, Clark – a former senior police officer – will oversee the implementation of the inquiries and the force’s cultural engagement practices.

In recent months, Lay has become increasingly vocal about racism within his ranks. He has condemned a series of racist stubby holders produced by officers, printed with slurs mocking the Sudanese, Aboriginal and Vietnamese communities.

In late June, he recorded a video for his members, in which he described the incidents as “mind numbingly stupid and insensitive” and “a failure of leadership”.

“It has shown me there is a dark, ugly corner of Victoria Police and I don’t like it. It embarrasses me and it should embarrass you,” he said.

So far, however, he has refused to accept that there is a systemic problem with racial profiling.

“It’s an ugly tag,” he says. “It has a connotation of a racist organisation that is out to hurt people. That’s what doesn’t sit well with me.”

At the People’s Hearing in Melbourne Town Hall, Mohamad Tabbaa was clear in his diagnosis: while there is a problem with overt racism among a minority of officers, the gravest issue is pervasive, implicit bias.

“For those of us on the receiving end, we know that the problem of police racism and profiling is endemic. It is a problem of police culture, and not individual attitudes. It is a problem of systems and structures, not of bad apples.”

Among the officers within those systems, diversity remains low. The force doesn’t keep complete records on its members’ ethnic background, but Lay acknowledges that it comprises “a large number of white Anglo-Saxon men”.

***

The theatre at the Police Academy in Glen Waverley is arranged with blue tables and blue chairs, aligned in rows on the blue carpet.

The room is full of recruits, both uniformed and protective service officers, in only their first and second weeks of training. They’re here for a session called Community Encounters.

It’s a kind of speed-dating the “other”: the recruits rotate among a dozen volunteers from different religious groups, ethnicities, physical abilities, sexual orientations and gender identities.

“People are quite complex,” warns Acting Senior Sergeant Scott Davis, before the conversation begins. “You can’t pick one thing about them and think it explains everything.”

Mohamed Saleh has been volunteering here for three years. He is 27; he grew up in the flats at North Melbourne, and eventually, he’d like to join the Federal Police. He speaks fast – he only gets 15 minutes with each group and he’s got a lot to say.

Saleh describes the cycle of profiling and exclusion he has witnessed, which was a common theme at the People’s Hearing a week earlier. “Listen,” he concludes. “When you get posted somewhere, even if your seniors tell you, ‘Forget Community Encounters, that’s all crap’, remember what you’ve learnt.

“A lot needs to change. It comes down to treating people with respect and dignity. You have power and it’s about how you engage with it.”

But all the questions he fields are about social issues in the flats, not policing. One recruit asks how people there can better assimilate with society.

Saleh isn’t deterred by these responses: “A lot of them are very eager – they want to be good officers,” he says later.

At the end of the encounters, Davis tells the recruits they are responsible for making cultural change in the organisation. “I put it fairly and squarely on your shoulders,” he says.

For now, however, they’re not being equipped to carry that burden. The community engagement training for police officers comprises only about 15 hours out of the 33-week course. Most of those are scheduled during the first two weeks, and some sessions continue to reinforce stereotypes.

On the third morning of their course, recruits hustle into class after a fitness test. The session, on multicultural communities and policing, begins with a discussion of the difference between migrants and refugees.

Then, a liaison officer who arrived in Australia as a refugee tells his harrowing story of state persecution in his former homeland and warns that he didn’t trust police here, as a result.

For the remaining time, the recruits respond to scenarios – they must contend with an Indian and an Afghani man who are fearful and angry towards them. One trainer warns the recruits that people who speak broken English might be faking it, to avoid fines.

In its submission to Victoria Police, the Law Institute of Victoria argued that the academy’s training should be much more sophisticated.

“People have a whole bunch of inbuilt biases, which are a way of coping with a complex world,” Tang says. “You need to critically examine them, particularly if you’re in a responsible position like being a police officer, and understand the assumptions that are driving you.”

American academic Lorie Fridell conducts “anti-bias” training through her organisation Fair and Impartial Policing. It trains recruits, as well as senior commanders in law-enforcement agencies across the US.

Fridell argues it’s misleading to characterise police as overtly racist. Social psychology research shows that discrimination is now more likely to be unconscious – but that doesn’t diminish the problem.

“In policing, implicit bias might lead the officer to automatically perceive crime in the making when she observes two young Hispanic males driving in an all-Caucasian neighbourhood,” she explains.

This kind of stereotyping happens everywhere. “The science tells us that even the best officers might practice biased policing because they are human.

“Agencies need to educate their personnel about how biases manifest and provide them with skills to reduce and manage them.”

That’s the sort of training advocated by the Law Institute. Tang says that without it, the community will lose faith in the force. “At the end of the day,” he says, “this is about community confidence in police.”

Policing the statistics

LAST year, The Age published a story quoting police statistics that Sudanese and Somali-born Victorians were about five times more likely to commit crimes than the wider community.

The statistics appeared to justify racial profiling of people from those communities, in order to cut crime rates.

Yet academics have consistently rejected a causal link between ethnicity and propensity to commit crimes, explains Associate Professor Steve James, a criminologist at University of Melbourne.

He says police statistics “tell us much more about how police behave than they do about the real rates of crime in the community”.

Some people and some crimes are more likely to be reported, policed and prosecuted, he says. Broad comparisons are fraught, too.

“The peak offending period is young men between about 16 and 24. If you’ve got a bulge of that demographic in your population stats, then you’re going to have more crime.”

James Lombe Simon was born in Sudan and lives in Footscray. At the People’s Hearing into Racism and Policing, he spoke about the criminalising effect of those statistics.

“How does somebody trust me enough to give me a job, knowing that I might be five times more likely to cause crime in their workplace? How will somebody let me rent their house?”

Victoria Police subsequently apologised for releasing the statistics, which were used in a briefing with community leaders. Chief Commissioner Ken Lay admits that it was “damaging” for the force’s public relations. “This wasn’t about trying to demonise,” he says. “This was about trying to say, ‘Well how can you get better at preventing these young people falling into a life of crime?’, which we were worried about.”

But Professor James argues that the numbers, which relate to alleged offenders, are unreliable. He says better evidence came from the Victoria Police LEAP database (which records officers’ interactions with people) during the racial discrimination case settled earlier this year.

Those records revealed that young African-Australian men in Flemington were two-and-a-half times more likely to be stopped and searched, even though they committed relatively fewer crimes than young men of other ethnic backgrounds. A statistician for the police accepted these findings.

 

Read this article and Policing the statistics at The Age online.

You can read Mohamad Tabbaa’s full submission at the People’s Hearing at Right Now.

Seams of discontent

In Community development, Environment, The Age on

Farmers, teachers and retirees are fighting controversial gas exploration plans in South Gippsland.

ON a rainy Saturday morning in early June, three-dozen men and women, nearly all middle-aged and wearing sensible shoes, sit in the council chambers at Leongatha, learning how to be activists. “The battle lines are drawn at Seaspray,” says Wendy, from Poowong, a dairy town in South Gippsland. “Something will happen, and we need to know how to conduct ourselves.”

Julie Boulton, a dairy farmer at Seaspray, a tiny town on Ninety-Mile Beach, explains that she’d been involved in a flash blockade a fortnight earlier, confronting the gas company Lakes Oil. “It was scary,” she says. “I want to learn heaps today and take it back to my community.”

Participants have arrived from all over Gippsland. Farmers, teachers, doctors and retirees, there to learn the basics of non-violent, direct action protesting. They hear about all manner of civil disobedience – blockading, locking-on, sitting-in – techniques employed successfully by residents in NSW’s northern rivers, where two coal seam gas companies recently suspended their operations.

South Gippsland is blanketed with more than a dozen licences for unconventional gas exploration – which uses controversial techniques to access hard-to-extract resources. For now, nothing is happening. In August 2012, the state government announced a moratorium on coal seam gas exploration and on the drilling method known as fracking, in which water, sand and chemicals are pumped underground at great pressure to fracture coal or rock, and release gas.

Even so, people are worried, fearful about risks to water supplies and local health, as well the price and productivity of their land. Poowong has declared itself “coal and coal seam gas free” and six other towns are likely to do the same before the year is out. The South Gippsland Landcare Network – which comprises 18 smaller groups – has publicly opposed the industry. “I’ve spoken to people who’ve never been against anything their life and they’re willing to go to jail over this,” says Mark Walters, the network’s vice president.

The training session in Leongatha is coordinated by the Lock the Gate Alliance and Quit Coal, a Melbourne group affiliated with Friends of the Earth. Julie Boulton listens intently, anxiously twirling her ponytail. For the last three months, she has been leading the campaign in Seaspray. When the facilitator from Quit Coal warns the Gippslanders that the police will probably keep track of them – as “activists and trouble-makers” – Julie turns to her daughter, who is a teacher, wide-eyed.

Ray, from the Strzelecki Ranges, has no such concerns: “If we stop ’em at Seaspray, we’ll stop ’em all over Victoria!”

Lakes Oil had been preparing to frack a well to the west of Seaspray, on land adjoining the Boultons’ dairy farm, in October 2012. The company wants to exploit an unconventional gas resource known as tight gas – which is held in sandstone, much deeper below ground than the coal seams – but the moratorium scuppered its plans.

Local angst has not abated. Over summer, Seaspray Primary School refused a cash donation from the company. In May, the board members – including former Liberal Party leader Alexander Downer and outspoken climate change denier Ian Plimer – visited the site to watch the flaring of a well, but were confronted with protestors instead.

Rob Annells, the CEO, is undeterred. He says he understands locals are worried, but believes their concerns are based on misinformation. “Wells all over the world are always drilled through water tables. Providing the regulations are good and adhered to, there’s no danger.”

“There is some disruption to the farmland at the time of drilling and fracking, but once it’s in place and the land is restored, you can hardly see where we’ve been.”

Annells is urging the government to lift the moratorium. He says the company could re-commence testing within six months, and if all goes according to plan, begin production within two or three years.

In late May, the Napthine government released its response to an inquiry into mineral exploration in Victoria. Its two-dozen recommendations are largely designed to secure resources, speed up approvals and reduce costs for miners.

The day before the meeting at Leongatha, energy ministers from around the country agreed on regulatory guidelines for the coal seam gas industry. In Gippsland, there’s growing apprehension that the moratorium will soon be lifted.

Ursula Alquier, from Warragul, is a coordinator with the Lock the Gate Alliance. She says the Minister for Energy and Resources, Nick Kotsiras, has refused to answer calls from Gippsland residents. “The main reason people are frustrated is because they’re being totally ignored,” she says.

Kotsiras, however, insists there will be “proper and thorough community consultation” before any decision is made about the moratorium. He says his department has begun identifying the changes necessary for Victorian rules to match the new national standards for coal seam gas, but it has no plans to assess tight gas.

Meanwhile, the federal government has funded new research, including a bioregional assessment of the Gippsland basin and a study of the chemicals used in fracking, but it will be about two years before they’re complete.  

Kotsiras says he will pay close attention to the science, but won’t promise to wait for those studies before deciding. The ban on fracking and coal seam gas is likely to remain in place until the end of the year. An announcement about community consultation is expected within weeks.

Nationals leader and Deputy Premier Peter Ryan is the member for South Gippsland. He maintains the government won’t “abandon those rolling green hills”.

“We are not going to risk our aquifers, or put farming in jeopardy – let alone our liveability – for the fact we may or may not have this resource underneath us,” he says. “This will be done very appropriately and in a timely manner.”

North east of Seaspray, Gregor McNaughton runs sheep on one of the largest farms in the area. He’s familiar with miners: they’ve been drilling on his property since the early 1980s and pipelines from Esso’s offshore oil and gas fields pass beside his paddocks.

For the last decade, he has received rent for ten gas wells on his land, which are now owned by a joint venture between Ignite Energy Resources and Exxon Mobil. As well as the income, he’s enticed by the prospect of new irrigation water, which would be created by the extraction process, should the companies go into production.

“We’ve never had any problems with mining companies here,” he says, as we bump over his paddocks towards the wells. “I’d be dead against them drilling on a small farm or close to town, but on broadacres like ours, I’ve got no objection. They’ve been very kind and they’ve kept up with their commitments.”

The wells haven’t yet produced anything. There’s a strong chance they never will, because Victoria’s resources are far from proven. Over the next two years, Ignite and Exxon plan to drill seven new wells in the area, continuing the search for coal seam gas.

Rick Wilkinson, from the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association, expects that onshore gas production here, from “whatever the rock – shale, coal or sandstone”, won’t occur for “another five to ten years at the earliest”.

All of Gippsland’s coal is brown. Wilkinson is not aware of brown coal seam gas having been produced anywhere in the world. “It would be particularly difficult and quite surprising if it actually comes to fruition,” he says.

Even if the gas flows, water may not. Most of the brown coal in Gippsland is subject to a groundwater cap, managed by Southern Rural Water. Producing gas is a thirsty business, and as it stands, miners will be forced to buy water rights from an existing user.

But the industry argues that exploiting unconventional gas is necessary to avoid shortages in coming years. Exxon Mobil spokesperson Chris Welberry says conventional gas fields in Bass Strait will diminish by mid next decade.

Critics of the industry, such as Mark Ogge, from the Australia Institute, say that any pressure on supply isn’t due to local demand, but rather, the lure of exporting gas to Asia at higher prices. “No one would consider drilling for gas in Seaspray if we weren’t about to begin exporting liquefied natural gas.”

Given our need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, he argues, it makes more sense to phase out gas in favour of renewable energy.

The Climate Commission last month released a report stating that most fossil fuel reserves must stay in the ground to avoid catastrophic climate change. “Why burn gas when renewable energy has no emissions, is often cheaper and getting even cheaper just as gas prices are about to skyrocket?” Ogge says.

At 66 years old, Gregor McNaughton remains a keen tennis player. He noticed recently that friends from the tennis club in Seaspray have put up Lock the Gate signs. The yellow triangles are appearing on more and more properties, bearing this warning: “Entry to this property is prohibited to coal and gas companies”.

“Something like this, it splits towns,” McNaughton laments. “People need to get educated about the facts.” But then again, he admits, others would say the same about him.

And whose facts, anyway? Last month, the Australian Water Association hosted a capital city tour on unconventional gas, featuring Dr Ian Duncan, a geologist from the University of Texas. In Melbourne, he told regulators and industry attendees that in the USA, where there are hundreds of thousands of shale gas wells, there was almost no evidence of adverse effects on groundwater or human health. The risks associated with coal seam gas, he suggested, were even fewer.

Wilkinson, from the petroleum association, ascribes worries about safety to “fear of the unknown”. “If half the so-called facts I’ve seen flying around were true, I would be worried about it as well,” he says.

But in a well-regarded report released last October, Dr John Williams, the former chief of CSIRO’s land and water division, concluded that the risks to water systems, agricultural land use and biodiversity were serious. Our piecemeal approach to regulation is leading us towards “degraded and collapsing landscapes”, he wrote.

Similarly, the National Water Commission has warned that coal seam gas poses significant risks to surface and groundwater systems. Recently, the commission’s chair, Karlene Maywald, said that while regulators had begun playing catch up on the science of coal seam gas, they were neglecting to prepare for tight gas.

In Queensland there are over 4500 coal seam gas wells – projected to increase 40,000 within two decades – which now provide a third of the gas used in eastern Australia.

Dr Gavin Mudd, a senior lecturer from Monash University’s engineering department, has been speaking about the risks at community meetings across Gippsland.

He says projects in Queensland have been approved without adequate background studies. “It’s absolute blindness to pretend there have been no impacts so far,” he says. “The problem is that evidence is often anecdotal, because the industry has been developed and regulated on the belief that there won’t be any impacts – so why waste money on monitoring?”

Down a dirt road out of town, Julie Boulton is showing me the spot where the locals blockaded the Lakes Oil board members, when a four-wheel drive comes the other way.

Bob Thompson, liaison officer for Lakes Oil, is taking a departmental inspector on a tour of the wells. “What’s your concern?” Bob asks, tersely.

“I’m concerned about our groundwater,” Julie replies quickly. “I’m concerned you’ll take a risk and damage our aquifer and we won’t be able to farm and live here anymore.”

“We don’t touch the aquifer,” Bob says. “There’s steel casing and concrete on the well.”

“But how long will that last?”

Bob brushes it off. He turns away and complains to the government man that she won’t believe him.

Afterwards, at her house, Julie and her husband David say Bob was right about one thing: “We don’t trust them. It’s too risky.”

On their table they have the results of a door-to-door survey conducted by local volunteers. All but a handful of residents agreed; they’ll to fight to keep Seaspray “gasfield free”.

GAS IN GIPPSLAND

Coal seam gas: Methane trapped in coal deposits.

Tight gas: Methane held deep underground in hard, impermeable rock, sandstone or limestone.

Fracking: A drilling technique used to extract gas by injecting a mix of water, sand and chemicals at high pressure to fracture coal or rock. Fracking is always used to produce tight gas, but only sometimes for coal seam gas.

Read this article at The Age online

Energy use portals

In Greener Homes, The Age on

Quarterly bill shock could become a thing of the past – if you can pay attention instead.

WHEN a smart meter was installed at Tim Forcey’s house in Sandringham in March, he decided to turn the extra expense into information.

He signed onto the free ‘Energy Easy’ web-portal offered by electricity distributor United Energy.

Mr Forcey is a chemical engineer and a member of the Bayside Climate Change Action Group. With his family, he’d already made some changes – installing insulation, external awnings, double-glazing and solar panels, and switching halogen lights for LEDs, among other things.

But the portal helped the Forceys understand even more about their bill. “You can compare your electricity use hour-to-hour, day-to-day, week-to-week and month-to-month. And you can also compare your use against a neighbourhood average,” he explains.

Their usage in May – about 16 kilowatt-hours per day, for four people – was about average for their suburb. But in the details, they found motivation to do better. With the help of hourly consumption data, Mr Forcey twigged that he’d been running two modems day and night. He switched one off, and put the other on a timer.

The new information also gave him a reality check. While he’d been “hunting for watts here and there”, he figured out that the family’s spa accounts for half their energy use. “People with pools would find similar things,” he says. “Those luxury items use a lot of electricity.”

Smart meters will be installed in every Victorian household by the end of the year. Retailers are beginning to offer flexible pricing, where you can choose to pay different rates at different times of the day. Depending on your capacity to understand and alter your habits, it will prove an opportunity or a threat.

Dr David Byrne, from the University of Melbourne, says most of us don’t have a good idea of how much we electricity use.

“People tend to underestimate their own energy consumption, relative to others’,” he says. “But there’s significant error on both sides. There’s a decent number who overestimate as well.”

He expects our knowledge will improve, as better billing information becomes a matter of competition between retailers. “We’re going to be more informed about our bills – there’s going to be much less scope for bill shock,” he says.

So far, several electricity retailers and distributors have launched web portals, of differing quality. You can find more information and links on the state government’s Switch On website.

Together with his colleagues in the economics department, Dr Byrne has been studying the way householders use Billcap, an electricity information portal used by retailers Click Energy and Australian Power and Gas.

Drawing on smart meter data, Billcap allows customers to view their usage, set energy budgets, estimate bills and compare consumption with similar and efficient households. It can also offer tailored conservation tips, as well as incentives to help shift peaks in demand.

Dr Byrne says that the households who were offered the service reduced their daily usage by 3 per cent, on average.

Those customers who used the site regularly did even better. “If you’re actively looking at the information, we found a 7 per cent reduction in daily energy usage,” he says.

The researchers are working to identify exactly how the participants cut back their usage, and who engaged most. “We’re digging further into the data, but these estimates are consistent with what has been found internationally,” he says.

Read this article at The Age online